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Q&A: Andy Shenkler, Deluxe

Andy Shenkler, Chief Product Officer at Deluxe, talks about how unifying the content supply chain in the cloud can help media companies meet the challenges of today’s complex content landscape.

What are the main challenges faced by media companies in managing the content supply chain?

The biggest challenge is standardised information: with the growing number of content creators, there is less consistency with how content, and its related data, is represented or shared between entities. Even something as simple as a basic title hierarchy to describe a piece of content can change materially between organisations. It can be challenging to have to support so many different “standards”. The goal is to create an orthogonal dataset (a structure that will allow everyone to describe their data in their own way) that will also allow for frictionless distribution and a consistent user experience across platforms.

Why is this so critical? Because when content is organised it can be automated, ultimately leading to a faster time to market and the ability to monetise content in new ways, which becomes even more important as broadcasters compete for audiences everywhere at an increasing speed.

What is Deluxe One and how can it aid content companies to meet their needs?

Deluxe One is a cloud-based platform that brings together our Hollywood-tested, end-to-end products and services – from content acquisition and title and asset management, to localisation, distribution, and through to consumer experiences of OTT / linear playout.

What are the main benefits of using a cloud-based platform in delivering a unified supply chain?

As new technologies continue to emerge, and with the pace of consumer demand not slowing, the cloud allows us to constantly upgrade our tech and also scale up and down as capacity needs change. By shifting away from on-premise infrastructure, we’re able to invest in the future of the industry versus just meeting today’s current demands.

The cloud not only helps decrease time to market, but also allows us to offer our customers flexible and more predictable cost models. We’re no longer held captive to long lead times of infrastructure acquisition or capacity constraints. We’re able to rapidly scale up infrastructure in order to support our clients’ peaks, as well as increase capacity for managing new and emerging large format files like UHD and 4K. What once took days or weeks to procure can now emerge in a matter of minutes. As more and more of our customers and partners continue to migrate their operations to the cloud, we’re seeing a rapid increase in efficiency and reliability.

What is the target market for this technology and what are its key differentiators?

Our goal was to create a platform that creators and distributors of all sizes could use. It’s flexible and modular so that a customer can use one piece of it and leave the rest, or take advantage of the full end-to-end ecosystem. But, the real power lies in the fact that every aspect of the platform is integrated, so the more aspects you leverage the easier it gets to use.

There are a lot of companies leveraging the cloud, but Deluxe One is unique in that it’s built on the back of the largest content supply chain in the world. Deluxe is the only provider with a true end-to-end capability from lens to living room, and now we’ve made that capability more accessible and scalable than ever before.

In contrast to a traditional MAM or DAM system, Deluxe One enables an entire ecosystem from creation to consumption. Leveraging deep system logic on the backend, Deluxe One creates clean set of assets upstream with robust metadata speeding up the creation of downstream deliverables by reducing redundancy and wasted resources.

What use case can you highlight to illustrate Deluxe One’s benefits?

We’ve found that one of the most exciting things about Deluxe One is its ability to allow for easy global expansion into new markets. When moving into a new territory with legal requirements, Deluxe One can take on the burden of distribution agreements and eliminate the need for a large operations team to sort through the various requirements.

After syncing with their library, OTTs find that Deluxe One can manage all their assets and provide distribution services directly in-app, simplifying localization, packaging and delivery while providing title tracking to coordinate release windows across different markets and devices to maximise monetisation.

For MVPDs, Deluxe One can help reduce the time and costs associated with content management. MVPDs work with hundreds of different content owners and providers, seemingly countless files, and processing those files individually can be an expensive process. Deluxe One can ingest assets from all your content providers and provide a view into everything at once through our title library, with automated processing, and provide visibility into where everything is at any given time.

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